]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/an-article-in-my-customer-knowledge-is-power-five-ways-to-empower-customers-with-knowledge/feed/0woodypnrAn article in the Guardian – top tips for creating an online retail communityhttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/an-article-in-the-guardian-top-tips-for-creating-an-online-retail-community/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/an-article-in-the-guardian-top-tips-for-creating-an-online-retail-community/#respondThu, 11 Jul 2013 09:24:41 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=155]]>I recently wrote a short piece for the Guardian’s Technology in Retail hub:

Top tips for creating an online retail community

Off-site communities are useful for retailers, but more powerful is having an online community built directly into the main site

Thanks to the kind folk at the Guardian for posting it. You can read it here:

Having people using a pure internet OS is compelling for me – it really IT overheads, it makes the company’s employees mobile, it just keeps us that bit more agile.

It worked great for a lot of tasks, after all our email, our CRM, our task management, basic documents, file storage – all of that is in the cloud anyway.

Where is all fell down is Office – doing any form of advanced word document, spreadsheet, or presentation isn’t an option.

We tried a few solutions: Google Docs, MS Office 365 and Zoho. All were fine for basic documents and internal collaboration, but the moment a document had to be client facing, they fell down.

It was basically not possible to do a proposal in any word processor, and output it in the format displayed in the browser. On our case – we need to output proposals and other documents to pdf to share with clients. So any company that wants to do a proposal or similar business document and send it out to clients really can’t rely on a cloud based solution right now.

Sure, there are plenty of excuses for why this is the case. Fonts display differently in different browsers, blah, blah. But it seems reasonable that MS could just specify you have to use IE, or Google that you use Chrome to get what you see on screen output as a pdf.

But I hear there is hope round the corner in the shape of iWorks for iCloud. A snappy name if ever there was one. Early reports seem to indicate a step change in performance on what is offered from Microsoft’s and Google’s online office options.

I’m looking forward to giving it a go, and hoping it will be the missing piece that will let us shift to fully online business processes.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/chromeos-a-fail-for-business/feed/0woodypnrRunning business off ChromeOS – sales are a gohttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/running-business-off-chromeos-sales-are-a-go/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/running-business-off-chromeos-sales-are-a-go/#respondThu, 16 May 2013 10:13:01 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=138]]>The first week of the ChromeOS experiment is underway and my sales guy is hitting the phones and the web apps…

The core packages that we’re using are Web based anyway and so are working fine.
Here’s how they breakdown:

CRM and pipeline management:Pipedrive
A great application. Like any CRM system both perfect, but once you realise this Pipedrive is great.
A simple tab and Pipeline stage system makes tracking who is doing what where very easy for me.

Emails, contacts and calendaring:
Google
Again we were already in the cloud with an based email having ditched outlook a couple of years ago, so this is easy.

Team management:Trello
Is everyone using this now? Their simple but flexible Web app plus native mobile / tablet apps makes this a great tool.
Again being in ChromeOS makes no difference.

Documents / Office suite:
Google docs
Simple, lightweight, free.
Google docs is working well to share internal documents be they sales notes, spreadsheets or presentations. Once again being already cloud software there is no problem here.

and we may use Office 365
Only £3 pcm pretty month for Web only access. It looks like office but stripped down.

Now we get to two areas with some issues…

Comms: instant chat, Web calls, and screen sharing:
We use hipchat which has a web client. So this works fine.
But making a Skype call, which is pretty standard, isn’t going to happen on ChromeOS. Obviously there are other options, Google hangouts being the most obvious, but this does require a change in behaviour.
Fortunately from a sales perspective making Skype calls isn’t core, and those that do heavily use Skype will understand hangouts, so this is a minor barrier for us.
Screen sharing in the sales context is more important, as we need to do sales over the phone and tech products benefit from being demoed. This is a solution we’re still looking into.

Screen grabs, photo editing:
This is proving a little clunkier than the various windows options and screen grab software available. But Google’s built in tools get us most of the way there.

It seems impossible to accurately reproduce a Google Docs page when creating a pdf – in any browser, even Google’s Chrome. This just doesn’t seem acceptable, and instantly makes it unusable for professional proposals.

Office 365 is little better, as it won’t even display a page break view in edit mode.

There are a few options left to try, like Zoho, but so far this has proven a blocker to a complete move to the cloud.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/running-business-off-chromeos-sales-are-a-go/feed/0woodypnrUsing ChromeOS for the sales teamhttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/using-chromeos-for-the-sales-team/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/using-chromeos-for-the-sales-team/#respondWed, 15 May 2013 07:55:59 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=136]]>We’re starting to build up the sales and commercial team at HipSnip and I’m looking closely at how to do this in a replicable and scalable way while keeping costs as low as possible.

We want to run the team off cloud software wherever possible. This keeps our own IT support requirements small and makes where we work and what we work on far less relevant. So as an experiment we’re trying out the new sales team on Chromebook, and I’ll move off Windows 7 to ChromeOS.

This does a couple of things. It will keep our internal IT support requirements low. It will also ensure we organise our tools well and with everything cloud based we don’t have a data loss risk, or it’s very very small. And it also keeps hardware costs down as a decent Chromebook is only £200.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/using-chromeos-for-the-sales-team/feed/0woodypnrOne reason Facebook defaulted to listing Facebook emails on profileshttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/one-reason-facebook-defaulted-to-listing-facebook-emails-on-profiles/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/one-reason-facebook-defaulted-to-listing-facebook-emails-on-profiles/#respondTue, 25 Sep 2012 16:01:03 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=117]]>I’ve just tried to find out the email address of a friend, so I did the obvious thing and checked Facebook. It lists her Facebook email. I don’t think she realises this, as I am 99% sure this is not what she uses for her email.

But it did make me realise why Facebook took the step of replacing listed email addresses with a Facebook one.

For many people Facebook is the place to go to check someone’s latest contact details. So by changing everyone’s contact email to their Facebook address, Facebook will benefit from a significant increase in incoming email volume, and an increase in a user’s overall retention to the Facebook system.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/one-reason-facebook-defaulted-to-listing-facebook-emails-on-profiles/feed/0woodypnrBCS Talk: Considerations when building a mobile consumer apphttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/bcs-talk-considerations-when-building-a-mobile-consumer-app/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/bcs-talk-considerations-when-building-a-mobile-consumer-app/#respondSun, 23 Sep 2012 19:36:27 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=118]]>I was recently lucky enough to be invited along to talk at the British Computer Society’s ‘how to design, build and market a consumer mobile app’.

My talk very much focused on the commercial aspects to be considered, and also on the mistakes we made in the early days of HipSnip. It also included some thoughts about whether building mobile first is actually the right choice.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/bcs-talk-considerations-when-building-a-mobile-consumer-app/feed/0woodypnrPitch openers: utilitarian, emotional and comparative business descriptionshttps://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pitch-openers-utilitarian-emotional-comparative-business-description/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pitch-openers-utilitarian-emotional-comparative-business-description/#respondMon, 16 Jul 2012 20:45:53 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=98]]>When you open a pitch it’s important to very quickly make the audience understand what you do.

After quite a bit of training and feedback, most recently on Springboard, I’ve segmented my opening into three types of description:

The functional: a clear description of what your business or product actually is

The emotional: a clear description of what your business or product achieves for its users or clients

The comparative: an easy to understand description comparing it to another well known business

The functional

This is a clear, if somewhat dry, explanation of what your business actually is. In our case I say:

“HipSnip is a shopping Q&A platform.”

We do Q&A, it’s optimised for shopping, and it’s a platform – it can be embedded into other websites.

This is intended to make the audience lean forward and think, “interesting, very interesting…”. I say

“HipSnip helps shoppers quickly decide what to buy, and buy more online”.

This gives people the consumer value – we’re helping people choose what to buy – at the same time as making it clear to investors where the money is going to come from – we’re helping people choose what to buy.

The comparative

This is a single, short sentence that will instantly tell someone what the business does. A balance needs to be struck here between using a comparative with a business everyone knows, that doesn’t work too well with one only ‘industry types’ know, but is accurate.

In our case I say that “HipSnip is a bit like GetSatisfaction, but for shopping advice”.

This works fine within the tech industry, but I’ve found it’s never worked in a single client pitch or anyone even slightly removed from tech. So I in that case I say “HipSnip is a bit like Yahoo! Answers, but for shopping, and embedded in your website”. This actually works well, and people get it straight away.

Putting it together

I’ve been told by some people I need the functional, some the emotional, and some the comparative. But in my experience having all three well tested is essential, and when put together it makes it easy to understand what a company does.

“HipSnip is a shopping Q&A platform. We help shoppers quickly decide what to buy, and buy more online. It’s a bit like GetSatisfaction, but for shopping advice.”

So don’t worry so much about your pitch. Get it to satisfactory, and just make sure your business is awesome.

]]>https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/todays-pitching-advice-sometimes-satisfactory-is-ok/feed/0woodypnrPath, Pair, Instagram (and more)… death by a thousand cuts (for Facebook)?https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/path-pair-instagram-and-more-death-by-a-thousand-cuts/
https://woodypnr.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/path-pair-instagram-and-more-death-by-a-thousand-cuts/#respondMon, 11 Jun 2012 20:01:20 +0000http://woodypnr.wordpress.com/?p=81]]>I’ve occasionally heard people talk about a ‘Facebook killer’, or ask what will replace Facebook in the future.

With their IPO this sort of question is more common than ever – after all, is it reasonable to think we’ll all still be using Facebook in 20 years? I will almost certainly still be eating Kelloggs, still be shaving with Gillette and still be drinking Disaronno amaretto. And even if those brands change, I’ll still be eating cereal, using a razor and enjoying the odd tipple. But Facebook? Will we even be using social networks in their current form in 20 years? In 5 years?

I’ve been thinking about this more recently after the birth of my second daughter.

It’s an event that is natural to share with those close.

That isn’t Facebook. While I love it, spamming my wide group of friends and associates with baby’s bathtime is not going to endear me to anyone. Nor do I really want them to share in these moments.

So enter Path.

It’s fantastic – my wife and I have kept it to a close circle of family members and the result is we post far more regularly than Facebook. And the feeling is a far warmer and intimate one than a Facebook feed. What’s interesting is the readiness with which others in our family have adopted it and to see what they’re sharing that’s not on Facebook.

Equally Instagram sits on the other end of the scale – a place where you can post anything and everything to your hearts content and find others who will be interested in seeing it.

Meanwhile Pair is an even closer network than Path, allowing a connection only between my wife and I. It’s great fun to start with, we’ll have to see how long we stay on it and whether it has true long term value…

—

In the short term this is the true threat Facebook faces in social networking – a death through a thousand cuts. As both consumers and devices become more sophisticated it’s getting easier to have multiple social networks.

My Android homescreen links straight to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instragram, Path, Pair, even G+… it’s as easy to fire on of these up as it is to share to a specific group on Facebook (easier actually, and the UI is optimised for different types of groups).

I think Facebook has made a wise move in buying Instagram. Whether the price was too high, low, or right is tough to say, but strategically it expands their presence in the overall volume of social media events.

It will be fascinating to see if they make moves in the other direction – especially to a more private and intimate social network.